There has been a known technology of using a plurality of computers on a network to perform distributed processing.
The technology enables a plurality of computers to perform processes in parallel, enabling a large amount of processes to be performed at high speeds even if each computer has low performance.
Also, there have been developed some home electric appliances that are provided with information processing functions. Under these circumstances, there has been proposed a technology for connecting such home electric appliances to a network and using the processing functions thereof. That is to say, there has been proposed a technology for achieving distributed processing computing on a home network. For example, a home electric appliance can complete a time-consuming process such as transcoding of image data by using processing functions of other home electric appliances.